National Violent Death Reporting System will track suicide data

Tuesday

Feb 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMFeb 26, 2008 at 12:57 PM

The death certificate provides the center with a suicide victim’s name, time of death and information about how he died. But the new system takes information from the police reports, medical examiners and toxicologists to create a fuller picture of the circumstances behind the person’s death.

S.H. Bagley

The National Violent Death Reporting System will change how we look at different suicides.

The system, developed under the leadership of Somerville resident Cathy Barber at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, provides a great deal of data on victims of suicide and violent deaths to create a profile of how they died.

“For suicide, it puts us head and shoulders above where we used to be,” Barber said. “We used to only have the death certificate.”

The death certificate provides the center with a suicide victim’s name, time of death and information about how he died. But the new system takes information from the police reports, medical examiners and toxicologists to create a fuller picture of the circumstances behind the person’s death.

“It can answer questions about their conditions at death,” Barber said, “whether the person was in treatment, if they had a crisis that day,” or if they were taking antidepressants.

"A third of young people who killed themselves had an argument that day,” Barber said.
“You hate to see that loss of life due to an impulsive decision,” she said.

The data the NVDRS collects will be used to study depression, Barber said. The data will be available for researchers and policy makers working to determine what drives someone to take his own life, and examines several factors, including age, race, ethnicity, sex, occupation, location, but also mental health information, drugs the person had at the time of death, personal events such as recent family deaths, job loss or financial difficulties.

“The types of suicides vary so much by age group,” Barber noted. “In young groups, people in their 20s, intimate partner breakups are a prominent cause.”

Barber said policymakers could use the system’s database to rethink their positions and policies. “It’s easy for people to develop policy based on their own idea of suicide.”

She gave the example of substance abuse patients and their suicide rates, and said researchers could study the link between drug problems and suicide.

The program, funded through the CDC, does not just collect data from Massachusetts, but also from Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, California, Kentucky, New Mexico and Utah.